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Ubuntu 10.10 For Netbooks To Have A Single Menu

04-27-2010, 12:00 PM

Phoronix: Ubuntu 10.10 For Netbooks To Have A Single Menu

Since rolling out Ubuntu Netbook Remix two years ago, Canonical has invested a great deal in improving this netbook-focused spin of Ubuntu to work well on such mobile platforms as it competes with Moblin / MeeGo and others. Developers have worked on making a functional yet innovative user-interface (including ARM-specific UI work), hardware optimizations, and tweaking various applications to run on the less-powerful and smaller devices. With Ubuntu 10.10, more changes are coming to the netbook edition...

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By default, we?d display the contents of the title bar. When you mouse up to the panel, or when you press the Alt key, the contents would switch to the menu. That way, you?re looking at the document title most of the time, unless you move towards it to click on the menu.

Internet Explorer 7 tried something like this (no mouseover, but alt key brought up the menu), resulting in panic and exodus.

I agree with the idea of hiding the drop-down menus when not in use, yes, but I'm leery of whether everyone else will.

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I like the idea of having a common, D-Bus-based interface for menus. I liked the global menu in KDE3, but I hardly ever used it because it only worked with KDE3 applications. I don't care if this feature ends up enabled by default on UNE 10.10; I think this common interface is far more important.

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I never use an OS without a global menu bar. I've got a Mac, I use Ubuntu with gnome-globalmenu, and I have used KDE with Bespin and the XBar.

Implementing a globalmenu in netbook remix means apps that don't *intergrate* worth a darn, like Firefox and OpenOffice, will have to clean up their act or be replaced. Firefox is easy enough, but gnome doesn't even *have* a native slide show presentation app-- I tend to export to .pdf and use evince, but that doesn't help me at all actually /creating/ the thing, which is where you really need the global menu bar working.

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I'm a fan of OS X's implementation of the global menu, but moreover I think this is a step forward for linux because it allows the window manager to properly theme one more of the things on display. So, it should open up some flexibility in how and when menus get displayed, and also improve aesthetic uniformity - something I feel the linux desktop, with its multiple toolkits, is in dire need of.

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Huh? Surely this is a large part of the entire point. At the moment, the application handes its own menus, not the WM. So apps using GTK look and behave differently to those using Qt. Having a single, central menu API would unify thiat.

Perhaps this could also be extended in such a way that applications could use this API and still retain their own menu bars - the WM would have to give each app its own menubar component and be responsible for drawing it underneath the titlebar. The app itself would just be unaware of how and where it gets drawn. Then the choice between global and distributed menus reduces to a checkbox in the DE's configuration. Is feasible?